VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY HOCHIMINH CITY

UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE

THE INFLUENCE OF GEOGRAPHY ON

USING LANGUAGE

Instructor: Dr. Tran Thi Thanh Dieu

Student: Kim Thi Thanh Loan
Student ID Number: 1657010154

Ho Chi Minh City, Oct 8, 2019

Introduction:

In many countries, there is a relationship in Britain between social dialects and

geographical dialects such that regional linguistic differentiation is greatest at the
level of varieties most unlike Standard English. The social and linguistic
reasons for the development of regional differences of this type are complex to
understand. They are clearly the result of language changing in different ways in
different places, but the actual process of linguistic change is something we have
still to learn much about.

Language geography has hugely been a decentralized area of study, implemented

by individuals with interdisciplinary interests rather than through collaborations
between linguists, geographers, and others with an interest in language and space.
While appeals for interdisciplinary dialogue went largely unheeded during the
20th century, a recent shift in theoretical perspectives and methodological
capabilities has revitalized the study of language geography as a truly
interdisciplinary field. With the popularity and accessibility of mapping and
spatial analysis tools in the contemporary digital age and the growing availability
of georeferenced linguistic data and language map data sets, linguistic geography
is experiencing a renaissance. Though traditional approaches to language
geography remain important to the field, a new body of research is developing that
involves sophisticated treatments of both language and geography to understand
questions about the development of languages; the relationships between
language, society, and environment; and broader human history. That’s the reason
why I chose this chapter to analysis.
When a linguistic innovation – a new word, a new pronunciation, a new usage -
occurs at a particular place, it may subsequently spread to other areas, particularly
those nearest to it, so long as no serious barriers to communication intervene. If an
innovation started in London, we would expect to find that it later began to be used
in Cambridge, in the centre of England, before it found its way into the speech of
Carlisle in the far north. It might, though, take considerably longer to reach
Belfast, because of the Irish Sea. This is an obvious point, and one that does not
apply only to language. All technological and behavioural innovations are subject
to the same processes.

There are so many things that we need to focus on.

1. The loss in English of non-prevocalic /r/

This is an example of a linguistic innovation. For instance, in words like cart and
car , shows those areas of England where loss of non-prevocalic /r/ in the
pronunciation of the words fann or yard has not yet taken place.

In phonology and sociolinguistics, the term rhoticity refers broadly to the sounds
of the "r" family. Especially, linguists commonly make distinctions
between rhotic and non-rhotic dialects or accents.

Rhotic speakers pronounce the /r/ in words like large and park, while non-rhotic
speakers generally don't pronounce the /r/ in these words. Non-rhotic is also
known as "r"-dropping.

Linguist William Barras notes that "levels of rhoticity can vary between speakers
in a community, and the process of a loss of rhoticity is a gradual one, rather than
the sharp binary distinction implied by the labels rhotic and non-rhotic"
("Lancashire" in Researching Northern English, 2015).

"Consider dialects that 'drop r' such as varieties of English spoken in the United
Kingdom, the southern United States, and New England. Speakers of these 'r-Iess'
dialects don't drop r just anywhere, they do so only under certain phonological
conditions.

For example, speakers drop r in a word when it follows a vowel, and would
therefore not pronounce the r in the following words:

 heart, farm, car

But they would pronounce r in these words, because r does not follow a vowel:

 red, brick, scratch

The r-rule in words is even more complex; though you may be familiar with the
phrase 'pahk the cah in Hahvad Yahd,' a stock phrase used to imitate this
dialectical feature, real speakers of such varieties of English in fact retain a
final r when the following word begins with a vowel.

Speakers say 'pahk the car in Hahvad Yahd.' (A similar rules accounts for so-
called r-intrusion, where some speakers add r to words that end in vowels before
another word that begins with a vowel, as in . . . That idear is a good one.)"

2. VARIETIES OF ENGLISH - RHOTIC AND NON-RHOTIC ACCENTS:

"[Rhotic accents are] accents of English in which non-prevocalic /r/ is pronounced,

i.e. in which words like star have retained the original pronunciation /star/ 'starr'
rather than having the newer pronunciation /sta:/ 'stah,' where the /r/ has been lost.
Rhotic accents of English include nearly all accents of Scottish and Irish English,
most accents of Canadian and American English, accents from the south-west and
north-west of England, some varieties of Caribbean English and a small number
of New Zealand accents. Non-rhotic accents are those of Australia, South Africa,
eastern and central England, some parts of the Caribbean, and a number of places
on the eastern seaboard of the United States and Canada, as well as African
American Vernacular English." (Peter Trudgill, A Glossary of Sociolinguistics.
Oxford University Press, 2003)
Rhoticity in British English

"While the dropping of 'r' had spread [from London and East Anglia] to most other
accents of England by the eighteenth century, rhoticity remains a feature of
accents spoken in the geographically more extreme areas of England today: the
southwest, northwest, and northeast.

This distribution suggests that the loss of this feature has been spreading outwards
from the eastern dialects since the fifteenth century, but has not yet affected these
few remaining strongholds. From this development, we might predict that
postvocalic 'r' will at some stage be entirely lost from accents of English, though
it is impossible to determine exactly when this process will reach completion."

A Change "From Below"

"Throughout most of the nineteenth century, non-rhotic pronunciations had

become characteristic of RP. The spread of non-rhotic pronunciation can thus be
seen as a change 'from below,' beginning in nonstandard London English and
spreading geographically northwards and socially 'upwards' until, in the early
twenty-first century, it is the rhotic pronunciations that are marked
as nonstandard in England.

Rhoticity in New York City

 "Sociolinguistically, there is more social stratification on the British model

in the accents of New York City than anywhere else in North America, with
upper social class accents having many fewer local features than lower-class
accents. New York City English, like that of Boston, is non-rhotic, and
linking and intrusive /r/ are usual. As a consequence, the local accent shares
with RP and the other non-rhotic accents the vowels /Iə/, /ɛə/, /ʊə/, /ɜ/ as
in peer, pair, poor, bird. However, as in the Boston area, younger speakers
are now becoming increasingly rhotic, especially among higher social class
groups."

 "The distribution of /r/ is one of the most widely researched sociolinguistic

features. The absence of [r] in coda position is generally associated with
lower social prestige and informal registers.
 "In terms of phonology, many AAE speakers in New York City and many
parts of the country tend to omit /r/ when it follows a vowel. This pattern,
known as 'post-vocalic /r/-lessness' or “non-rhoticity,” leading to the
pronunciation of 'park' as pahk and 'car' as cah. It is not unique to AAE
and is found in the wider New York City vernacular among older and
working-class white speakers, but not very commonly among young, upper
middle class Whites."
 Sociolinguistically speaking, the map that we saw from this chapter represents
a considerable simplification of the true state of affairs concerning
nonprevocalic /r/ in England.

 First, it is confined to only two words: an examination of data for other

words would reveal additional areas, such as parts of east Yorkshire, where
non-prevocalic /r/ may be pronounced.
 Secondly, it is socially very incomplete. All along the eastern edge of the
south-western area, for instance, it is only older speakers from the lowest
social groups who are 'rpronouncers', and even they are likely to ust; an /r/
less frequently and pronounce it less strongly than speakers further south
and west.
 Thirdly, the map gives information only for rural linguistic varieties. For
many urban areas, particularly the larger towns, the impression given is very
inaccurate since, unlike the rural areas, they may be entirely 'r-less'.

2. THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN URBAN AND RURAL ACCENTS:

Linguistic innovations cause the difference between urban and rural accents. This
is due to the general economic, demographic and cultural dominance of town over
country, and to the structure of the communieation network. An innovation
starting in London is quite likely to reach Bristol before it reaches rural Wiltshire,
although the latter is nearer. A Chicago-based innovation is likely to get to
Rockford, Illinois, earlier than to some smaller town in between. The speech of
Manchester, too, is in many ways more like that of London than the traditional
rural dialect of a village in nearby Cheshire: London Manchester Hyde, Cheshire
 'brush' [brA.s] · [brus] [br<iiS]
 'such' [SAC] [sue] [sic]
 'tough' [W] [tuf] [tnf]
 'put' [put] [put] [pur]

The Manchester and London forms are not identical, but there is a regular
relationship such that all London [A] and [u] vowels correspond to Manchester [u]
vowels. In the case of the Hyde forms there is no such regular correspondence.
Speakers of rural accents have been said to speak more slowly than speakers of
urban accents. However, there would appear to have been no previous empirical
investigation of such a claim. The urban (Edinburgh) speakers usually speak faster
than the rural (Orkney) speakers. The claim that rural speakers speak more slowly
than urban speakers therefore still awaits empirical support. Some discussion is
offered concerning the possible relationships among speech tempo, lifestyle and
accent.
3. THE ORIGINAL PRONUNCIATION [U] BEING REPLACED BY A NEW
PRO:IMNCIATION [A]:
For example, there is the difference between London [A] and Manchester [u].
This innovation has since spread northwards and westwards, but has travelled so
slowly that it has not yet reached Manchester or other areas of northern England.
Notice, though, that southerners and RP speakers nevertheless have an [U]-sound
in items such as put and full, good and cushion. The historical development
behind this is that the short u vowel inherited from Middle English underwent a
split, perhaps 300 years or so ago. The mechanism of this split is not, I think,
thoroughly understood; but the upshot was that in most kinds of modern
English full does not rhyme with dull, nor put with cut. In my book Accents of
English (Wells 1982) I called this split the FOOT-STRUT split, since FOOT and
STRUT respectively were the keywords I used for the lexical sets affected. In
terms of the phonemic system, English acquired an extra vowel contrast, leaving
it with six stressable short vowels in place of the earlier five.
Attitudes are different again when we take another characteristic feature of
northern pronunciation, namely the use of a short vowel in words such as bath,
staff, glass and answer. This reflects yet another instance of northerners standing
out against a sound change that took root in the south of England and in RP¸ the
change I call BATH Broadening. For a thousand years or more in the history of
English bath and so on had had a short vowel, just as in words like cat and trap.
But by three hundred years or so ago London people were lengthening this vowel
in the position before [f, T, s], voiceless fricatives. So bath went from [baT] to
[ba:T]. In due course further changes meant that the long and short vowel qualities
came to diverge rather noticeably, so that we now get [bA:T] with a very different
vowel-sound from cat [kæt].
Some words resisted this change. And new words with the short vowel came into
the language. As a result, broad-BATH speakers now have non-rhyming pairs such
as gl[A:]ss but g[æ]s, c[A:]stle but t[æ]ssel, bath but maths, pass but mass,
disaster but aster, answer but cancer. And they still haven't altogether made up
their minds about plastic, graph, and substantial.
4. THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MANY DIALECTS
The increased geographical mobility during the course of the twentieth century led
to the disappearance of many dialects and dialect forms through a process we can
call dialect levelling - the levelling out of differences between one dialect and
another .This process of dialect levelling is a very interesting one for sociolinguists
because today it seems to be playing a very important role in ongoing linguistic
developments in many countries. The situation in England is, however, rather
more complex than that. What seems to be happening is that Traditional Dialects
like those of Hyde are disappearing, but the larger modern dialect areas which do
remain, and continuing to diverge from one another.

For example, the Merseyside area is increasingly characterized by a rather

dramatic sound change in which the consonants /p,t,k/ are increasingly becoming
fricatives so that, for example, lock can now sound very like a Scottish speaker
saying loch i.e. [lok > lokx > lox] . There is even some sign that the consonant /t/
may disappear altogether in some positions as part of this process: bat [beet > beet'
> bee' > bee] . There is no sign of this development happening in any other dialect
region.

5. THE MOVEMENT OF PEOPLES CAN PLAY IN THE SPREADING OF

LINGUISTIC FORMS FROM ONE PLACE TOANOTHER. BUT THE
MOVEMENT OF PEOPLES CAN HAVE OTHER RATHER MORE
COMPLICATED CONSEQUENCES ALSO.
Consider how it was that the different dialect areas on the east coast of the United
States grew up in the first place. There were three factors at work here.
We have suggested that the growth of the different dialects that were later to spread
westwards was due, as in England, to the fact that different linguistic changes had
taken place over time in different places. There is, however, one important
difference in this respect between England and the USA.
American English was in origin a colonial variety of the language, meaning that it
was brought to its present home by the largescale migration of peoples from
somewhere else - the British Isles. So another factor giving rise to the different
American dialect areas, then, must have been the fact that different parts of the
eastern seaboard of North America were settled by people coming from different
parts of the British Isles, and also at rather different times
If many Americans today say It's a long ways to go while English people always
say It's a long way to go, this is because some areas of the USA inherited the ways
variant from northern Ireland. And, the story obviously does not end there either.
We have to recognize that another important factor is that nowhere on the eastern
seaboard was exclusively settled by people from one particular area of the British
Isles. The point is that everywhere in North America to which English was taken
would have been the scene in the early years of settlement of considerable dialect
mixture: people from many different parts of England, -Scotland and northern
Ireland (most of Wales and southern Ireland would not have been English-
speaking at the time) came together in individual communities bringing their many
different regional dialects with them. Dialects that in the original homeland would
have been spoken many hundreds of miles apart were suddenly thrown together
on a day-to-day basis.
6. DIFFERENT MIXTURES OCCURRED OF DIFFERENT COMBINATIONS OF
BRITISH DIALECTS IN DIFFERENT PROPORTIONS IN THE DIFFERENT
AREAS:
The dialect mixture situation would not have lasted more than a generation or
possibly two, and in the end everybody in a given location would have ended up
levelling out the original dialect differences brought from across the Atlantic and
speaking the same dialect. This new dialect would have been 'mixed' with respect
to its origins, but uniform in its current characteristics throughout the community.
Where dialect levelling occurs in a colonial situation of this type - or in the growth
of a new town, for instance - and that leads to the development of a whole new
dialect, the process is known as koineization (from the Ancient Greek word koine
meaning 'general, common'). Exactly how this koineization happened in the USA
is now, several hundred years later, difficult to reconstruct. However, we have
some clues about the koineization process from recent research in New Zealand.
The English of New Zealand is the most recently formed major variety of the
language: English speakers did not arrive from the British Isles in large numbers
until the 1840s. Fortunately we have some recordings of what people born in New
Zealand in the period from 1850 to 1890 sounded like - large numbers of them
were recorded in the 1940s for radio broadcasts of pioneer reminiscences. What
we can learn from this is the following. The first generation of New Zealand-born
anglophones grew up in situations where a whole mixture of dialects from
different parts of the mother country were spoken, and they seemed to have
pleased themselves (without of course giving it any conscious thought) about
which vowels and consonants they would · select from the mixture present in the
adult speech around them. They therefore used new combinations of features - one
woman pronounced here and there as if she were Scottish, and out as if she came
from London! - and these combinations would differ from one person to another
even if they had grown up alongside one another.
 7. LINGUISTIC INNOVATIONS SPREAD FROM ONE REGIONAL OR SOCIAL
VARIETY OF THE SAME LANGUAGE TO ANOTHERAND FROM ONE
LANGUAGE INTO ANOTHER:

For example, “the European uvular r”:

At least the sixteenth century, all European languages had an r-type sound which
was pronounced as r still is pronounced today in many types of Scots English or
Italian: a tongue-tip trill (roll) or flap. In the seventeenth century, a new
pronunciation of r became fashionable in upperclass Parisian French. This new r,
uvular r [R] , is pronounced in the back of the mouth by means of contact between
the back of the tongue and the uvula - technically a uvular trill, flap, fricative or
frictionless continuant sound - and is the type of r sound taught today to foreign
learners of French and German. Starting from this limited social and geographical
base, the uvular-r pronunciation has during the last 300 years spread, regardless of
language boundaries, to many other parts of Europe. It is now used by the
overwhelming majority of urban or educated French speakers, and by most
educated Germans. Some Dutch speakers use it, as do nearly all Danes, together
with a majority in the south of Sweden and parts of the south and west of Norway,
where it still appears to be spreading. On the other hand, it is not used in Bavaria
nor in much of the Swiss German-speaking area, nor, except for a small area in
the north-west adj acent to France, in Italian.

8. LINGUISTIC INNOVATIONS CAN SPREAD FROM ONE DIALECT INTO

ANOTHER ADJACENT DIALECT.
If spreading of this type takes place across language boundaries, on a sufficiently
large scale, linguistic areas are formed. It appears that only grammatical and
phonological features require geographical proximity before diffusion of this sort
can take place.
(Uvular r can now be found, as we saw, in Norway, but it almost certainly arrived
there from France via Germany and Denmark.) Lexical items appear to be able to
spread across much greater distances. Words can be borrowed from one language
into another regardless of proximity.

The basic cause of dialectal differentiation is linguistic change. Every living

language constantly undergoes changes in its various elements. Because languages
are extremely complex systems of signs, it is inconceivable that linguistic
evolution could affect the same elements and even transform them in the same
way in all localities where one language is spoken and for all speakers in the same
locality. At first glance, differences caused by linguistic change seem to be slight,
but they inevitably accumulate with time (e.g., compare Chaucer’s English with
modern English or Latin with modern Italian, French, Spanish, or Romanian).
Related languages usually begin as dialects of the same language.
When a change (an innovation) appears among only one section of the speakers
of a language, this automatically creates a dialectal difference. Sometimes an
innovation in dialect A contrasts with the unchanged usage (archaism) in dialect
B. Sometimes a separate innovation occurs in each of the two dialects. Of course,
different innovations will appear in different dialects, so, in comparison with its
contemporaries, no one dialect as a whole can be considered archaic in any
absolute sense. A dialect may be characterized as relatively archaic because it
shows fewer innovations than the others, or it may be archaic in one feature only.
After the appearance of a new dialectal feature, interaction between speakers who
have adopted this feature and those who have not leads to the expansion or the
curtailment of its area or even to its disappearance. In a single
social milieu (generally the inhabitants of the same locality, generation, and social
class), the chance of the complete adoption or rejection of a new dialectal feature
is very great; the intense contact and consciousness of membership within
the social group fosters such uniformity. When several age groups or social strata
live within the same locality and especially when people speaking the same
language live in separate communities, dialectal differences are easily maintained.

The element of mutual contact plays a large role in the maintenance of speech
patterns; that is why differences between geographically distant dialects are
normally greater than those between dialects of neighbouring settlements. This
also explains why bundles of isoglosses so often form along major natural
barriers—impassable mountain ranges, deserts, uninhabited marshes or forests, or
wide rivers—or along political borders. Similarly, racial or religious differences
contribute to linguistic differentiation because contact between members of one
faith or race and those of another within the same area is very often much more
superficial and less frequent than contact between members of the same racial or
religious group. An especially powerful influence is the relatively infrequent
occurrence of intermarriages, thus preventing dialectal mixture at the point where
it is most effective—namely, in the mother tongue learned by the child at home.
 9. OTHER LANGUAGE GROUPS ADOPT WORDS PERTAINING TO THE
FIELD OF PARTICULAR LANGUAGE:

When speakers of a particular language happen to be dominant in some particular

field, other language groups adopt words pertaining to the field from this language.
For example, many English musical terms - like adagio, allegro, crescendo - are
of Italian origin, while sporting terms in many languages, like football, goal,
sprint, as well as terms connected with pop music and jazz, tend to be English.
Related words:
 Gobbledegook (n): informal very complicated or technical language that
you cannot understand
 Journalese (n): a style of writing that is used mainly by journalists
 Leet (n): informal a form of written English used for example in
chatrooms in which letters are replaced by numbers or other symbols
 Legalese (n): informal formal language used by lawyers and
in legal documents that ordinary people find difficult to understand

10. SOMETIMES LANGUAGES EVEN 'BORROW' WORDS WHICH DO NOT

EXIST:

At present, English is a source of loan words for very many languages, particularly
in Europe. Borrowings of this type happen initially through the medium of the
bilingual individual, and individuals bilingual in English along with their native
language are becoming increasingly common as the result of the widespread use
of English as a lingua franca and it correspondingly widespread teaching in
schools. It is due not to any inherent superiority of the English language as a
medium of international communication, but rather to the former world political,
economic, educational and scientific dominance of Britain and the similar present
dominance of the USA.
English is definitely lacking when it comes to defining. In this infographic we have
10 non-existent English words along with their translation in another language.
Even though there may be words in English that can describe the things listed
below, there are no direct translations.

For instance, what is a word that means “to look worse after a haircut?” Sure you
can say that the person looks bad, horrible or even terrible, but in Japanese they’d
be defined by the word “age-tori.”
How about “singing and crying at the same time?” In English, you would use that
exact expression or maybe call the person emotional, but in French the person
would be defined using the word “chantepleurer.”
Other examples:
 Pana po’o
Scratching your head in order to have you to remember something you have
forgotten. (Haiwaiin)
 Kabelsalat
The word for a tangled mess of cables can be translated as “Cable-salad”.
(German)
 Gurfa
The amount of water you can scoop up with just one hand. (Arabic)
 Gulseong-gulseong
 Eyes filled with tears, with are about to fall but have not yet run out of the
eyes. (Korean)
 Badkruka
This word is used to talk about someone who is reluctant to get into the
water when swimming outside. (Swedish)